A teleconference is a conference held among people in different locations using telecommunications equipment, such as telephones or video conferencing terminals. Audio and, sometimes, video supplied by each participant on the conference is communicated to every other participant on the conference to enable communications among the conference participants. The equipment that enables communications among the conference participants is a bridge or a switch, which broadcast data received from each conference participant to all other conference participants.
In today's state-of-the-art teleconferencing and video-conferencing applications, the media (audio and video) are presented to each participant in real-time. In other words, what a participant says at any particular time is instantaneously heard by the other participants. This demands constant attention on the part of each participant, which in a busy business environment is not always possible. For example, while participant A is talking, if a participant B is momentarily distracted by other tasks, B must ask A to repeat what was said. As another example, participant C who joins the conference late would also miss the discussion that has already taken place.
Today's state-of-the-art conferencing applications may also provide recording capability, but the recording is usually available only after the conclusion of the conference. It has been proposed, for example in U.S. Pat. No. 5,692,213 to Goldberg et al., to provide a method and system for recording a real-time multimedia presentation and replaying a missed portion at an accelerated rate until the missed participant the ability to momentarily divert his attention from the real-time presentation, go back to a previous part of the presentation, replay that part of the presentation and then rejoin the presentation in real-time.
However, one drawback with the system proposed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,692,213 is the requirement for each participant to have a computer system with substantial processing power and storage capacity. The proposed system would also require an efficient method of distributing and updating software to each participant.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to enhance the current conferencing products to allow users better control of the media content. More specifically, it would be desirable to provide an improved method and system for controlling real-time multimedia content, which separates the processing and presentation of multimedia content and also allows centralized buffering and processing and shared control of the presentation by the host and each participant.